Abstract The importance of non-dodecaphonic rotation- and inversion-based arrays in Pierre Boulez’s oeuvre after his marked stylistic shift in 1975 is well documented in the scholarly literature. Despite isolated commentary on their role in Boulez’s earlier works, however, their significance to his overall compositional practice has not been examined in detail. Building on previous work and based on an analysis of Boulez’s sketches and published scores, I illustrate how these arrays operated within his compositional process at various stages of his career and demonstrate how he adapted them in the mid- to late 1950s as he developed a conception of harmony that served him for the remainder of his career, thus explaining their importance to his later works.
C Catherine Losada (Thu,) studied this question.